The department offers courses in the following areas:
- Environmental and resource economics
- Economics of organic farming.
In research, projects are dealing with two main areas. The first research focus is on economic issues of organic farming. In addition to individual analyzes and the evaluation of different policies, the economic analysis of the certification system and the explanation of the spatial distribution of organic farming are of particular interest. A broad spectrum of methods is used here: participatory and qualitative methods as well as programming models and econometric methods.
The second focus is on interdisciplinary modeling approaches. Based on the economic theory of farming, model concepts are developed that allow simulating the agricultural production at landscape or regional level. These models are e.g. used to analyze the impact of climate change on agriculture and to assess agri-environment policies. The main focus is on programming models and their integration with large simulation models. These approaches are supplemented by econometric analyzes of the effects of climate change on agriculture.
